


A Few Little Fireworks

by madmogs



Category: The Professionals
Genre: 1980s, M/M, Mercenaries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-14
Packaged: 2017-11-25 12:58:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/639154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madmogs/pseuds/madmogs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yet another of Bodie's dodgy old colleagues pops up, and sets off an explosive chain of events.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Few Little Fireworks

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted as part of the Santa Pros fic exchange of 2005. 
> 
> Betaed by dragonladyk and byslantedlight, and historical information provided by spinsterbiddy the younger.

Ever after, Bodie would blame the whole sordid affair on Ray Doyle's bladder. If Ray hadn't been acquainting himself with the gents at the Rose and Crown when Liam 'Molotov' Nolan had walked in, then none of the whole unspeakable episode would ever have occurred. 

Of course, if Ray had been sitting there when Molotov had walked past, a large London landmark would probably have been a pile of rubble within 24 hours, but then, said landmark didn't feature terribly largely in Bodie's world in December 1984. It was for Doyle that the personal was the political, and vice versa, while Bodie's care and loyalty was given only to people--a very short list of people--and the whole business with Molotov was about to shake a different kind of landmark entirely.

"Don't let me keep you, petal," he'd said to Doyle's announcement, and watched idly as his partner had walked his rent-boy walk over to the gents at the back of the bar. Faced with that distraction, Bodie had been unprofessionally oblivious to the doings of the bar in general, right up to the point when he'd felt the tap on his shoulder.

And now, here he was, with Molotov sitting opposite him, supping from a pint of Guinness, looking as if the eight years since they'd last worked together had been as a watch in the night. 

"Well, well, well! Fancy seeing you here, Billy-boy." 

"It's been a while," Bodie said neutrally, never inclined to be kindly disposed to those who addressed him as Billy-boy. "How's life in the bush these days?" 

"Grand as ever. And there I was thinking you'd been dead all these years," 

And there he was thinking nothing of the kind. Molotov didn't have the look of someone who was seeing a ghost, more of someone who was seeing a man he'd spent time and money to track down, and had just found. That wasn't a good sign in someone he owed his life and a few other things to. "Where did you get to anyway?"

"Oh, here and there." Bodie took a mouthful of his pint. "I've been around. Surprised to see you back in this country." If it had been Bodie, three outstanding warrants for murder would have been enough to keep him in sunnier climes.

"Is that so? A little bird told me you tried going straight for a while."

He was slipping, if word of his post-Africa life had got back to the merc community. Still, Molotov would hardly have approached him if he'd heard chapter and verse--particularly about some of his time in 3 Para. The past was another country, wasn't it? and Bodie always liked to keep his countries safely on separate continents from each other. So much cleaner that way, wasn’t it?

"I did, briefly," Bodie said dismissively. "It didn't pay." Molotov wasn't the kind of acquaintance to whom one mentioned CI5--and he could definitely live without the kind of painful little heart-to-heart with George Cowley that tended to result from that kind of admission.

"Ah, and isn't that the truth? I spent some time back in the Emerald Isle myself, but it's just not the same now. The old crowd, they've got feeble in their dotage, and they've no place left for a man like me who still has a bit of fire in his belly. You might as well not have a cause if you're no' going to fight with everything you've got for it." He took a long pull of his beer, and remarked offhandedly, "At least the new crowd haven't let their teeth be pulled yet."

"Causes were always your thing," Bodie said lightly, in the tone of one who'd never been bothered by any such considerations. If Molotov was still playing the IRA and the INLA off against each other that was his own affair. On the other hand, if he wanted to do it in London, it would rapidly become Cowley's affair. So he sat, and waited, and listened.

"Oh, you know how it is, Bodie, a man's got to believe in something--"

"--even if it is just his next pay cheque." Bodie finished, his own version of Molotov's creed. Molotov looked at him and shook his head, as if to say 'you always did miss the point.'

It was at that moment that Doyle decided to come back from the loo, stopping short and looking askance at the stocky red-headed Irishman who'd nicked his seat. He looked across at Bodie, his eyes asking silently?if suspiciously--who the bloke was.

"Ah, Ray," Bodie said expansively, "Meet me old mate, Liam. Ray Doyle, Liam Nolan. Liam's an old mate from Africa." Tell you later, he projected silently, meeting Ray's gaze levelly.

"That right?" Doyle said without particular interest. "Then I suppose you won't mind if I take a few minutes out to chat up that bird over there."

The bird in question had a slim figure clad in a tight red dress, and from the back definitely looked worth the effort. Bodie waved his hand airily. "Be my guest, mate. Single girls like that don't come your way very often, you poor deprived thing."

Doyle snorted. "Pot and kettle, mate, pot and kettle. Well, have fun chatting about the bad old days, won't you? Ta-ra."

Bodie watched the superb rear view as Doyle slinked his way over to the young woman at the end of the bar for a few seconds before turning his attention back to Molotov.

"Boyfriend?" Molotov asked.

"Liam, my son, I'd hardly be sending him over to chat up the talent if he was, would I?" Bodie said, ignoring the fact that chatting up the talent had been entirely Ray's idea. Not that it wasn't tempting, but in Bodie's book 'boyfriend' was a far lower life-form than 'partner'. He glanced at Molotov, dismissing his musings. "But you haven't come here just to pass the time of day with me, have you?"

"Ah, you know me too well, Billy-boy. It just so happens I have a little job coming up that could use a man of your talents, if you're agreeable."

Bodie lowered his eyelashes and gave Molotov his most sophisticated look. "I'm always agreeable, Molotov."

"How do you fancy celebrating the festive season with a few little fireworks in a public place, Bodie?" 

Little fireworks, eh? Bodie did not allow himself to show any sign of interest that wasn't strictly pecuniary. "That rather depends on what you're paying, doesn't it?"

"Four hundred. Two hundred before, two hundred after." 

Bodie leaned back, as if relaxing, and gave a wide, closed-mouth smile. "I always did like to do something special for Christmas."

"Ah, that's grand, Billy-boy. You can meet us tomorrow in the back room of the Tickled Trout in Shoreditch at three PM."

"Us, eh? Anyone I know?"

"Just a few friends from the good old days who came along for the ride. I dare say you'll remember some of them." 

"So what's the job then?"

All he got in response was a slightly sharkish look, a smile that Bodie wouldn't have trusted half as far as he could throw its owner. "I trust you don't have any inconvenient possessive feelings about London department stores?"

A thousand things flew through Bodie's mind before he gave Molotov an inscrutable look from under half-closed eyelids, and said, "Oh, not in the least." 

* * *

Bodie was enjoying himself, Doyle decided grumpily.

It wasn't every day that the mad bastard got to tell George Cowley that he and an unspecified number of other mercenaries had just been recruited by an Irish ex-merc to blow up one of London's department stores. Doyle had never seen Cowley's eyebrows raise quite that far before.

"And he came to recruit _you_ , Bodie," Cowley said wonderingly for what had to be the third time. "I still can't work out what he'd do a damn fool thing like that for."

"Oh, I don't know," Bodie said, "I have my uses from time to time."

"That's not what I mean, and you know it," Cowley said, annoyed. "The IRA don't hire outsiders, they stick to their own. They're stepping out of their modus operandi, and I don't like that--and they had their crack at Harrods a year ago. There's no reason why they'd be trying the same trick again this year--all the stores have been locked down tight ever since."

"That file's out of date," Bodie said. "Nolan isn't IRA, he's INLA." Doyle could fill the rest of the gaps in for himself. The Irish National Liberation Army considered the IRA to be too easy-going by half. The INLA were especially keen to set terror loose on the London streets while getting one up on the IRA at  
the same time. But they were also so quarrelsome among themselves that the only chance they had of organising a piss-up in a brewery was to hire outsiders to do it for them. And an ex-merc like Molotov Nolan would be ideally placed to do exactly that.

"Aye, I suppose that makes a twisted kind of sense," Cowley said, managing to look both pensive and ill-tempered at the same time, a combination that boded ill for whoever in Records had missed that piece of information. "They're trying to outclass the IRA bombing last year. And what else do you know that might not be in that file of ours, Bodie?"

Bodie thought for a moment. "Nothing that should come as any kind of surprise. He's an explosives man, and a good arm with a grenade. He's also a Krivas-calibre strategist ... but without the psychosis." Bodie took the report and leafed through it. "Doesn't say much about his background, does it? I don't think I can improve on that. Rumour was, he came from the Lower Falls area of Belfast, but that's probably guesswork. He's everyone's best mate, but it's not his style to talk about himself."

_Sounds like someone else I know,_ Doyle thought. _I wonder if they breed them out there._

Cowley's mind must have been working along similar lines. "I can see how that might be the case. You'll be attending that meeting, of course, Bodie. The INLA don't have the money to hire the likes of you. I want to know where the money's coming from and I want to close _them_ down.

"Sir," Bodie said, levelly. He only adopted that tone when he had misgivings about something, Doyle thought.

"We'll have the room wired for sound, of course--Doyle, you'll be manning the listening station and co-ordinating any action that's required--you can pull up to five people off the standby roster."

_Great,_ Doyle thought. _So I not only say goodbye to any chance of a hot date with Shelley but I also get to pull people away from their Christmas pud as well. Nice to be popular, isn't it?_

Still, he could always blame it on Bodie--it was Bodie's psychotic friends who were the cause of the problem. Fact of life, that was.

"Is a wire really necessary, sir?" 

Doyle looked up in surprise. Bodie might grumble at orders, but it was usually Doyle who questioned them. 

"Take it up with your partner. This is Doyle's op, Bodie, and it's necessary if he says it's necessary. Now get out of here, or you'll be complaining about me monopolising your off-duty time."

Doyle didn't need a second telling. Dragging Bodie behind him, he left the room.

"So what's wrong with wearing a wire, then?" he said when they reached Bodie's car. "Or were you thinking you could stop your little pals all on your own?"

"No way, mate. I like my heroics to come with backup, thank you very much."

Doyle fluttered his eyelashes. "Why, I didn't think you cared. You berk."

"Nah, there's just too much risk of them finding it. Bugging the room should be enough."

"Why, you likely to be getting down and dirty with them or something?" Doyle asked, the image of Bodie and Molotov in flagrante delicto popping into his head before he could prevent it. He winced.

Bodie gave him a pained look. "Ray, my son," he said, "do you really think that Molotov is my type of girl?"

Doyle could never resist scratching at perverse itches like that. "Oh, I thought he was quite cute, you know, in a perverse kind of way."

Bodie patted his leg. "Not a chance. You know my heart belongs to you, petal." 

The bastard always said things like that, and he was always joking. Doyle looked across at him but it was impossible to make out Bodie's face in the darkness of the unlit car. He could still feel the heat on his thigh from Bodie's hand. 

It had been manageable before--in fact it felt as though he had been 'managing' it for the last eighteen months--but it would have been so much easier if Bodie had been the bastard he always pretended to be. The trouble was, he wasn't just an unfeeling thug any more than he was 'just' a lazy hedonist or 'just' an incredibly loyal friend. It was when he'd started to find Bodie's arrogance endearing that he'd twigged he was in real trouble.

"So what kind of watering-hole is the Tickled Trout anyway?" he asked.

"Just your friendly neighbourhood local," Bodie said lightly. "Only it's not just beer that's making the carpet stick to your feet."

Doyle grimaced. "Charming. I'll be sure to take Shelley for a drink there--if we ever actually get that first date."

* * *

The nearest parking space to the Tickled Trout was two streets away. Whatever it didn't have going for it, it did offer a modicum of privacy. The street was empty, so Bodie clicked on his R/T. 

"3.7 to 4.5."

"4.5." Doyle said in acknowledgement a moment later. 

"Any of our little friends arrived yet?"

"Three," Doyle said, his voice crackling slightly over the R/T. " Miguel and Jag, and a third bloke who won't give a name. Those mean anything to you? I have pictures but no IDs yet." 

"Oh, I know Mig and Jag of old," Bodie said, rifling his memory for a surname. "Brothers. Jag is short for Iago, believe it or not."

"Iago spelt...?"

"I-A-G-O. Like in Othello. Surname is ... damn, gimme a moment ... Da Silva, I think."

"Oh, that kind of Iago," Doyle said. Bodie laughed, and wondered absently how many other kinds of Iago there were. "What about our third man?" Doyle continued "If he's the one who arrived at the pub just before he joined your friends then he's about six-four, and nearly that broad across the shoulders. He's got a face like someone tried to cross it out with a knife. Know anyone like that?" 

"No one who's still breathing. And from your charming description, I think I'd rather not."

Ray treated him to one of his dirtier laughs. "You haven't got a lot of choice, sunshine, if he's the bloke in there with your friends. Oh, and they mentioned someone called Dave. No other name but he's just flown out from Ghana."

"Dave... that's no bloody use."

"Well, don't come crying to me--I wasn't about to knock on the door and ask 'Dave who?'" 

Bodie laughed at the mental images that generated. "Don't worry, Ray, I'm not about to get your shirt wet. Tell them to look up Dave Donohue and Dafydd ap Sion. They're the ones I know most likely to want to bomb the English. What about Molotov?"

"Not there yet. Miguel told tall, dark and ugly he'd got a message that he’d be late."

"Right." Bodie looked at his watch. "And that’s what I’m going to be if I don’t go and join the happy throng now. Have fun up there while I’m hobnobbing with the rich and infamous." He climbed out of the car and locked it, sparing a rueful glance for his hubcaps. They’d be off the car and cash in someone’s back pocket before he’d even reached the pub, if this part of town lived up to its reputation.

Heading down the rubbish-strewn pavement to the Tickled Trout, Bodie began his mantra. You had to get in the mood for an op like this, lock up the soft, easily-bruised parts of yourself and forget them. Look after number one, was how he'd lived back then ... look after number one 'cause you're the only one who will. Believe nothing, love nothing, care for nothing ... trust nothing but your gun and your fists, and the luck that you make for yourself, and what does it matter if other people die?

Doyle was good at that, he acknowledged, thinking himself into a part, even when he was turning himself into the kind of hired killer that would give him nightmares for weeks afterwards. Christ, he'd probably make a more believable merc than Bodie would, and Bodie'd been there.

Forget Doyle, he told himself. The one thing a mercenary didn't have was a partner. 

By the time he pushed the door of the Tickled Trout open even most of his tougher co-workers would have backed off from his 'hard man' walk and the glint of death in his eye. He might have changed since then, but by God he hadn't changed that much. 

As he'd expected, the place was a dump. They'd clearly not had the carpet cleaned since the last time he'd set foot in here, as the two were still very nicely sticking to each other, and the dark wood-panelled walls seemed to be encrusted with ... something. Still, Bodie strode up to the bar with no outward sign that he gave a damn about his surroundings. 

At three pm on a weekday afternoon the place should have been deserted. It was hardly packed, even so, but there were several clusters of hard-looking individuals, squashed close together and talking in low voices. This was somewhere you went to do business. He earned several suspicious looks as he walked up to the bar, but something in his face or body language settled them before he reached it. Just as well, that. He was rather attached to his teeth.

"What d'you want?" the barmaid snarled at him. She was a brassy fake blonde with a low-cut top, the kind of bird he'd have been trying to get into his bed had she not failed two of his three criteria for eligibility. At least she was under fifty, but that one had always been more of a guideline, compared to the 'warm and comes across' side of the deal.

"Pint of bitter, please love," he said, and passed her a pound note when she came back with his drink. "And have one yourself." 

She didn't thank him. He shrugged and took a sip, noting absently that the beer had been watered. He'd drunk and eaten far worse things in the line of duty.

There was a mirror over the bar and he checked his reflection in it briefly, taking the opportunity to do a good scan of his surroundings while he did so. He looked right--the clothes were right, the boots work-worn and comfortable, his body language alert and wary, the gun not quite invisible, and his right hand not too far away from it. 

No point in wasting time, was there? He picked up his drink and headed through the door to the back room, waving away the barmaid with a 'name's Bodie, I'm expected' as he did so.

* * *

"Oi," Doyle said to Anson, the other occupant of the surveillance room. "Time to swap."

He didn't wait for a reply, merely put the binoculars into Anson's hand (the one that didn't contain the ubiquitous cigar) and pulled the headphones off his ears.

"Suppose that means that Bodie's in there now," Anson said as he headed over to the grimy window, binoculars in hand. There was a camera waiting on the windowsill, and he picked it up and checked the settings before lifting the binoculars again.

"You suppose right," Doyle said, pulling the headphones down over his own ears as he watched Anson clamber over the broken forklift truck pallets that still strew the floor of the abandoned warehouse, nursing the cigar with noticeably more care than he bestowed on the binoculars. 

They were in a building almost opposite the pub, in a room that offered a perfect view of the front entrance. Doyle would have liked a view of the back entrance too, but he'd contented himself by stationing two of the B-squad boys, Wilson and Campbell, in an empty van on the other side. He'd even confiscated the bottle of Christmas cheer that Campbell had brought with him. There wasn't much sound coming from the room itself yet. He imagined that would change when Bodie arrived. 

He could never figure out why anyone in their right mind would ever send Bodie on an undercover op. He could do two accents--home counties and his native Scouse, and only one role--himself. The only thing he had going for him was that 'himself' was a surface so smooth and menacing that almost anything could be hidden underneath.

Normally when CI5 needed information from one of Bodie's contacts, it was the gun-runners they went to. Vultures, Doyle always considered them, clustering round the real killers and making their livelihoods off them. But the gun-runners operated behind a thin, fake veneer of civilization, the kind that wore sharp suits and bulging wallets. He could see how Bodie fit with them; he just couldn't for the life of him see Bodie fitted in with Krivas and his ilk.

His musings were interrupted by the sound of a door opening and closing through the headphones. "Evening all," he heard Bodie say. "Lovely weather for the time of year."

* * *

The back room was functional but not glamorous, the dark wood panelling rather cleaner than that at the front of the bar, with a bottle-green carpet that was threadbare but largely beer-free. There was a nice big window at one side, its panes covered by net curtains. Ray would find it useful when the shit hit the fan, he noted. Mig and Jag sat to the left of the doorway; the third man sat on its right, his chair pushed back from the small table so that he wasn't in a line of fire from the window.

_Someone's cautious,_ he thought, and flicked on the light switch to get a better look at tall, dark and ugly.

The man was just as Ray had described him, his face almost unrecognisable under the scars that criss-crossed it ... almost, but not quite. Bodie would have recognised the expression in those eyes anywhere, particularly when they were turned on him.

"Turner," he said darkly, feeling the blackened, filth-smeared walls of a Leopoldville gaol spring up around him.

"Bodie," Malcolm Turner drawled out, and stood up from the armchair to his full 6’4" height. "Thought you'd killed me, didn't you?" 

"Maybe." Back in the hot, noisome darkness of a Congolese night, insanity only a hair’s breadth away from governing him, he'd thought exactly that. He'd been crammed with nineteen others into a cell twelve feet square, with just enough room for all of them to sleep on the floor, so long as nobody kicked Big Malky turning over in the night. 

"Disappointed?" Turner asked him.

"About par for the course, really, Malky," Bodie said as indifferently as he could. Cowley wouldn't like it if he drew his gun and blew the guy away here and now. _Wouldn’t be worth the effort, or the paperwork,_ he told himself firmly.

"You two know each other?" Mig asked, never that fast on the uptake. 

"What does it look like, Miguel?" Turner said, "Fer Christ's sake, what'd Molotov bring this little runt in for?"

"It's your own fault, Malc. If you hadn't snapped the neck of our last triggerman Molotov wouldn't've had to go out hiring so late."

Bodie tsked, and Turner looked at him sharply. "Messy," Bodie said in a low voice. "Annoys the coppers, that. Gives the place a bad name."

"I'll snap this one's neck too. He deserves it."

"The hell you will," Bodie growled. He could smell that prison cell, a pervasive stench of sweat, urine and sickness. Turner's fist flashed towards his face, and Bodie evaded it, trying to redirect Turner's momentum to bring it down. The evasion worked; but Turner was too big and heavy to be dropped so easily. Bodie twisted round to keep the big bastard in his sight.

"So you've learned something," Turner said, The stretch of his mouth couldn't really be called a smile. Bodie had made those scars himself, but it hadn’t been with a knife, oh no; it’d been with a piece of glass he'd found by the side of the road they'd been sent out to build. 

"Maybe," Bodie said.

"Sounds like you've forgotten things too. Remember the Game?"

You didn't forget the Game. With a bastard like Malc Turner you fought if you had to, won if you could, because the penalty of losing was too damned high. The penalty of winning wasn't a bundle of laughs either. "I remember," he said. 

"Let's see how well you remember." 

"You challenging me?" Bodie said. Turner spat on the floor. Answer enough, really. Bodie met his eyes for a moment, and then, as one, they moulded themselves into their fighting stances and attacked.

* * *

"Shit!" Doyle's exclamation was so sudden it caused Anson to drop his fifteenth cigar. "Get Records on, PDQ. We need background for a Malcolm Turner, now."

"Where's the fire, Doyle?" Anson drawled, but put the binoculars down and reached for his R/T immediately. Bloody useless position, watching the front door of a pub when the action was going on at the back. Not that Wilson and Campbell would be able to see much either, but that couldn't be helped. At least they were close at hand if they were needed.

"Bloody Bodie, holding out on us as per usual." Doyle winced as the sound of something solid hitting flesh came through the headphones, and then the creak and crash of furniture falling. "This Turner's our third man. _And_ he knows Bodie well enough to hate his guts. Five minutes in the same room, and they're already trying to pound the crap out of each other."

"Doesn't do things by halves, does he?" Anson muttered, but he was already thumbing on the R/T and requesting the information. Doyle withdrew back into himself, listening to the sounds of the fight on the other end of the mike. His hands were hurting and when he looked down at them he realised his fingernails were digging into his palms. He tried to force his hands to relax but they didn't seem to want to.

The Game. Christ. 

Sure, he'd heard rumours about the Game--who hadn't?--but he'd never asked Bodie about it, telling himself that Bodie would only refuse to answer anyway. In a sudden lurching moment he discovered that he'd been lying to himself--he'd never asked the question, he discovered now, because he really, _really_ didn't want the answer.

Doyle wiped his hands on his jeans and shut his eyes as the unmistakeable sound of a punch landing was followed by a grunt that could only have come from Bodie. He couldn't see what was going on, and for a moment he thought it was just as well, because he could not stomach ... could not even contemplate sitting through and listening to whatever was going to happen if Bodie lost the fight and the bastard Turner did what his words were promising to do. 

He couldn't. He just couldn't. He'd abandon the listening station if it came to that, and op or no op, he'd pull Bodie out from that mess and worry about Cowley later. There were some things that were going too far even in the line of duty.

_Bodie, you stupid bastard,_ he thought, but before he could complete the thought, he heard a cry through his headphones that he knew perfectly well wasn't Bodie; and from the rustling and the impacts that followed, Bodie was making good use of his momentary advantage. Doyle wished he could pace, expectant-father style, and he almost jumped out of his skin when Bodie's voice said with calm, deliberate poise: "Don't think there's anywhere you can go from here, mate."

It was then that Ray realised that there was something even more unbearable that he hadn't considered. How on earth could he sit and listen to what followed if Bodie won?

"Don't you dare, Bodie, don't you fuckin' dare," he snarled into the darkening warehouse.

* * *

Bodie looked up from where he had Malc pinned on the floor, and treated those assembled to his nastiest smile. "Looks like that settles that, then," he said, as soon as he could make it through a sentence without panting. Reality seemed to be behaving itself now. He was back in London, rather than just outside Leopoldville. 

"You haven't finished," Jag said pointedly.

Bodie sighed dramatically. "Darling," he said, deliberately camp. "Even I have standards about who I sleep with."

"There are rules, Bodie. You know the rules."

And the rules were just what he'd been trying to avoid. Getting forced to get back in with his old mates was one thing; having to be intimate with them was another entirely. "Oh come on, do I look like I want pubic lice? Big Malky here"--he gave the merc under him a shake--"probably has every disease in the book."

"Make him blow you," Mig said, laughing like a drain.

"From someone who has teeth and hates my guts? Not bloody likely.

Turner tried to twist round under Bodie's pinning arms, and Bodie leant forward, just a little, and used an ounce more force to move Turner's right arm just that bit closer to dislocation.

"What're you gonna do to me?" Turner choked out. Reality shifted again, became darker, dirtier, back to that tiny gaol cell with its cluster of dumb, wall-eyed watchers always careful never to meet his or Malky's eyes.

"You know the rules, mate. Winner does what they want to the loser. Whatever they want." He gave Turner a small shake. "Think I haven't got the guts?" Another shake. "Well, do you?"

"You think you're so fucking hard," Turner said with difficulty. "It was sheer luck that you put me down. Nothing but luck--"

The last syllable faded into a mere aspirant as Bodie put his free hand over Turner's groin and squeezed. "You were saying?"

"Fuck you!" The yelp had a singularly strangulated tone. 

And who was Bodie to pass over a line like that. "Actually, I had quite a different scenario in mind." He squeezed a little harder, and felt with satisfaction the khaki trousers go from comfortably fitting to tightly stretched over the area in question. "Revenge," he said in a low, resonant voice. "Isn't it wonderful?"

Okay, he thought. Okay, so he wouldn't stoop to anything so crass as rape, but there wasn't any harm in giving big Malcolm a small reminder of exactly what it felt like to be aroused against one's own wishes. He eased the man's flies down so that a tool that was every bit as big as he remembered bulged out. "Course, I don't think it's really revenge at all. You see," he said in the exact same voice he used on his birds, "I think you're going to enjoy it.

"What the ... fuck are you doing?" Malc gasped.

"You need lessons, hmmm?" Bodie asked, "Oh, I'm sure you'll work it out in time." 

The door of the room being opened and closed was an ignorable irrelevance, but the voice that broke the silence a moment later certainly wasn't. "Bodie! What the feck do you think you're doing?"

It was Molotov. Bodie stared at him for a moment in speechless silence as the mixed blessing of sanity reasserted itself. 

* * *

"Thank God," Doyle said to nobody in particular. "Thank bloody God for that."

Anson gave him a look, but didn't ask any questions. Doyle closed his eyes, breathing hard as though he'd been running. He let the sound of Molotov's dressing-down wash over him, noting absently that he sounded just a little like an Irish version of Cowley.

"...'d have thought the last ten years might have given you some semblance of maturity, Bodie! You’re wasting my time and money, and I won’t have that," Molotov was saying loudly. "I’m not fleecing NORAID out of several thousand pounds just so you can play jungle games on my time."

"NORAID?" Bodie said, in unwitting synchronicity with Doyle. "You got your money from NORAID?"

"What's so funny about that, Billy-boy? They're always keen to advance the work of the cause ... And unlike some, they don’t ask feckin’ nosy questions about it while they do. I just hope you didn’t kill too many of Malc's brain-cells when you dropped him."

"Don't worry, he'll still make an affectionate and lovable family pet," Bodie said, apparently unconcerned, and Doyle pulled the headphones off and turned to Anson, heart pounding, but face grim and determined.

"Right, that's it," he said. "We know what the deal is. Now let's shut the bastards down." 

* * *

The door and window burst inward just as Molotov had marked the explosives stashes on the map. Bodie was the first to hit the floor.

"This is CI5," Doyle’s voice boomed through a megaphone. "Lay down your weapons. We have you surrounded."

Molotov responded with a burst of gunfire in the direction of Doyle’s voice, his eyes raking the others in a clear ‘attack’ command.

Malc grabbed a sub-machine gun from the floor and sprayed bullets in a wide arc around the room, followed by another, his gun weaving in skilful circles. Bodie watched him carefully. The moment Malc turned his back on him, he leapt, knocking the gun down and to the side so that the next stream of bullets rebounded harmlessly into the wall, and brought his own gun down hard against the side of Malc's head.

Had it been anyone else, they would probably have dropped like a stone. What did drop, however, was the gun, much to Bodie's relief as he drove a knee into Malc's kidneys. 

He saw Malc's hands move and blur an instant before the fastened round his throat, and had to content himself with a second knee, hard, at the man's groin while he tried to prise the hands away enough to take in air.

He wouldn’t be winning any prizes for finesse, that was for sure.

"Down!"

Doyle. Bodie responded instantly, strangulation or no.. He relaxed totally, carrying his weight and centre of gravity as far down as he could manage, and then fell the rest of the way as a shot rang out and suddenly Malc's hands weren't around his neck at all.

He lay on the dirty carpet watching the spots clear from his eyes, trying to pull enough air in to satisfy his lungs. His eyes were watering incessantly, and the cream paintwork of the ceiling overhead swam in and out of focus.

Ray. Ray had saved him. Was good, having a partner around the place. 

Then he remembered what Ray must have overheard, and dread started to set in.

* * *

"I learned a lot of things this evening," Ray said when they were safely back in Bodie's flat, and the door locked behind them.

Bodie looked at him, the adrenalin of the evening's work turning into acid in the pit of his stomach. "Yeah, suppose you must have done."

"Yeah," Doyle said. "No wonder you don't tell me much about your past."

"You've never wanted to hear it."

"You could at least have the goodness to be ashamed of it." 

Bodie walked past him and subsided onto the settee. "I don't talk about it because it's dead and gone, that's why," he said. He wasn't going to justify his shame or lack of shame to Doyle. Just because Ray was blessed or cursed with an overactive conscience didn't mean that Bodie had to follow his example. He'd survived, dammit, and he'd done what was necessary to do just that.

"Not all that dead, or that gone, if tonight's display was anything to go by.

"If it isn't, it should be," Bodie said, and his voice sounded drained even to him. "Let the dead bury  
their dead, Ray. I'd've stayed out there if I'd liked living like that.

"Yeah." Ray turned on his heel and headed into the kitchen, busying himself with the kettle. "Yeah," Bodie heard him say indistinctly, "well, it's none of my business, is it?"

The last thing that Bodie wanted was Doyle drawing away from him. He wasn't given to heart-to-heart talks--relationships that called for those were more trouble than they were worth, in his book--but he knew instinctively that if he let Ray walk out now, the Doyle/Bodie partnership would stay broken until it was too late to mend it.

"You’re my partner, Ray," he said. "That makes it your business--unless somehow the things I did to survive ten years before I met you somehow make me not good enough for you."

"It's not what you did ten years ago that bothers me--it's what you did tonight." 

"Tonight--" Yeah, well what could he say to that? _Tonight I thought I was back there_? Well, that would probably be a one-way ticket to Dr Ross's office. He'd probably spend the rest of his career trying to persuade the Pre-Raphaelite ballbreaker that he was sane and functional. 

"Tonight what, Bodie? Why did you do that? What got into your tiny mind and made you think that you had to play perverted sexual games with a bloke you nearly killed ten years ago?"

_I wish I knew._ Bodie shrugged. "Just seemed the thing to do at the time." 

"Why? Why were you prepared to do it?"

Prepared didn't come into it, Bodie thought angrily. "You don't get it, do you? Someone challenges you to the Game, you don't have a choice, all right? You fight back or they attack you and they do it anyway. Did you expect me to do that for the sake of your civilised western sensibilities?" 

"You weren't in fucking Africa, Bodie. You were in a public house in Shoreditch. Did you forget that or something?"

"What if I did?"

"You were prepared to fuck that--" Doyle froze. "What if you did what? Forget where you were?" 

"Pub like that," Bodie said, groping at straws for a convincing answer, "easy mistake to make, really."

Doyle _looked_ at him, the kind of look that made him look like the infamous Dr Ross herself. Unready for that kind of scrutiny, Bodie shifted uneasily.

"Right," Ray said at length. "We can live without the backbiting and the jumping to conclusions. You are going to tell me exactly what your history with Turner is, and what the deal with that Game is."

"Don't I get a say in the matter?" Bodie asked plaintively.

"No." Doyle folded his arms, canting his hips as he leant against Bodie's lounge doorway. Bodie's throat went dry. Ray seemed to have no concept of what that stance did to anybody with a pulse.

"At least come and sit down," he said. He was damned if he was going to tell the truth that would lose him his partner with that invitation propped in front of him.

Ray considered it a moment and then strode to the armchair opposite the sofa and flung himself into it. "Now you're going to talk," he said. "Start with Turner. How did you meet him?"

"Congo. A prison near Leopoldville, actually. Kinshasa, you'd call it now." Ray opened his mouth to speak, but Bodie continued before he could. "They caught me running guns to the wrong side, didn't bother with trials in those days, so they just locked me up, along with half-a-dozen other lads. Malky was top dog inside, was his habit to help himself to the new boys when they came it."

"So you fought."

"If you like."

"And won."

"Not really. Hammered each other too badly to do anything more than crawl away. But that was it afterwards. He wasn't going to stop 'til his position at the top was unquestionable." Fairness compelled him to add, "I wasn't going to stop either." 

"I can imagine."

"Yeah."

"Did he ever win?"

_Yeah._ "Sometimes."

Doyle, bless his sensitive soul, didn't ask him to fill in any of the tedious details. "Did you?" 

"From time to time."

"And you fucked him."

Bodie tensed. "What makes you think that?"

"You'd have done it today. And you told me five minutes ago that you thought you were back there. Seems to indicate that you'd done it before, doesn't it?"

"Twice."

"What about other people?"

"Yeah, I've played the Game with other people. But not like that. Only when two people both chose to play, not the way big Malky used to do it."

Doyle stared at him, a look on his face as though he'd never seen Bodie before. Bodie felt a lump of ice form in his gut as the silence stretched out and lengthened. Room was cold. He ought to get up, put the central heating on, but he imagined that if he broke eye contact now, Doyle would never forgive him.

Joke. Doyle'd probably never forgive him anyway.

"You know something?" Doyle said at length. "Something really stupid? I was in love with you. Real, absolute 'til death do us part' love."

A few seconds passed before Bodie realised that he was staring at Doyle with his mouth gaping open. He closed it. _Ray,_ he thought, _in love with me. Damn._ "And now you're not?"

"That's where it gets stupid."

"What's stupid about--oh!"

"Yeah. I can't stop just because you're not what I thought you were, you bastard, not even because you're a rapist. Ironic, right? I'm even jealous of the bastards you've played the Game with."

"Jealous?" The strangulated yelp that came out of his mouth was just a little bit undignified.

"I never claimed it was logical. But if you're bent enough to do things with the kind of bastard who'll switch sides in a war for pay, then surely you'd have just enough taste to find your own partner attractive."

Doyle's earlier slant-hipped pose against the doorway flashed into Bodie's mind. _God, Ray,_ he thought, _you just don't know the half of it._ "Listen, Ray. I'm not about to screw up the relationship that keeps both of us alive just for the sake of an evening's entertainment, or however long it lasts. We're partners, and that's the bit that's important. If we mess with that, we're going to get one of us killed, and that's not an option. Not for me. Not that you make it easy, the way you pose yourself around the place in those tight jeans like a rent-boy."

* * *

_Like a rent-boy._ So much for Bodie's indifference, Doyle thought. "So you have thought of me like that," he said thoughtfully.

"No. I haven't. And do you want to know why?" Bodie asked him angrily. "Because I can't afford to. Same as I don't think about married birds and birds who want commitment that way."

"I'm not asking for an engagement ring, you bastard"

"Damn right you're not." Bodie stabbed at his chest with a forefinger. "Because you're already married, to fucking CI5. We both are. If we started going at each other like weasels on heat, we're messing about with that relationship. And that's liable to end up with us dead.

Aggressiveness always brought out the worst in Doyle. "Don't give me that guff about commitment--I doubt you even know the meaning of the word. You're afraid, that's what it is."

"Afraid of death?" Bodie asked derisively. "No way!" Well, that wasn't true, and Doyle even knew it, the bastard, but there was a difference between afraid and cowardly. The fear of death merely sharpened the pleasure of evading it.

"Of commitment, you bastard." Doyle almost yelled at him.

"Commitment makes you vulnerable."

"It makes you _alive_.

"And then it makes you dead," Bodie said contemptuously. "All right, Ray, what is it? What's going to make you satisfied with our professional and personal relationship. Tell me."

Contempt was a game that two could play at. "You couldn't handle it."

Bodie laughed at that. "Ah, but darling, you couldn't either, see? I'm not going to fuck things up, even for you. See, there was this sister in Africa--"

"Oh, please, not fucking Africa!" Doyle said and turned away, looking out of the darkened kitchen window. " I've heard more than enough about the dark fucking continent for one day." No, he hadn't heard enough--but he wanted answers and truths, not to listen to Bodie babbling on about his sexual conquests.

"It's important, Ray." Doyle looked at him suspiciously. When had Bodie learned to manipulate him? "There was this sister at a hospital near where we were stationed this one time, in Angola. I told the Cow about her once--you remember, that business that went to hell after the idiot newspaper published the witnesses' names and addresses."

"Yeah. I remember." 

"Well, this sister and me, we were friends, nothing more, and it was a good working relationship. My group were responsible for keeping supply lines open to the hospital."

"Didn't think they hired mercs for stuff like that."

Bodie shrugged and made no comment "Well, this nurse and me, Jennie, her name was, she was our liaison, we got on fine. Right up to the day she slit her wrists and blamed it on me for not being in love with her."

"Right. And you never flirted with her at all, not even slightly."

"I didn't. I was already with someone, you see. There was this doctor, you see, the one who used to take...

"I know, I know, she'd take your pulse to see if you were ready to go again. So you were seeing some other bird. So what?"

The doctor hadn't in fact been as female as Bodie usually made out, but that would only cloud the issue right now. "So I don't mess up friendships--or work relationships--over sex. I'm not going to make myself ridiculous like that poor bitch Jennie did." 

"Well pardon me if I take that with a pinch of salt. It's never seemed to stop you with Betty, or about fifty per cent of our female agents and most of our support and clerical staff." 

"You're my partner, Ray--there's a difference." Bodie sighed. "Look, we rely on each other. Don't ask me to mess that up."

Doyle gave him a strange, sad smile. "It's already messed up, Bodie. Didn't you notice?"

Bodie lowered his gaze, silent acknowledgement of his own part in the drama. "And you think this'll fix it."

"Look, you stupid bastard, we made this partnership work--and look how that started out. _If_ we want to, we can. Besides, what have we got to lose at this stage?"

"You mean, apart from our jobs and our lives? Absolutely nothing." Bodie came closer and sat on the coffee table opposite Doyle, knees touching, the way he had once before, in a different crisis and a different flat. "Listen, Ray, anyone else, I'd tell them I don't do commitment. But I do, don't I? We're already partners. But I don't love. I don't know if I'd recognise it if it bit me on the arse. For all I know, it could just be lust on my part."

Lust. Partnership. Friendship. It was a better start than most people got.

"Is that right?," he said, feeling calmer than he had for the eighteen months since he'd first put a name to his feelings. "I'd be disappointed if it wasn’t lust." 

"Oh there is that," Bodie said archly, a detail it only took Doyle a glance to confirm. "Haven't you noticed?"

Doyle raised his eyebrows. There did appear to be evidence in that direction. "I think I'm beginning to. Are you saying you want to?"

They looked at each other in silence for a moment, and Doyle read the 'yes' in suddenly-unguarded deep blue eyes. Bodie rubbed his hands together and put on a wide, slightly crazy-looking grin. "What are we waiting for, my son? Let uncle Bodie give you the benefit of his experience."

His experience. Doyle halted, stopped short by the ghosts still in the room even now. "We're not playing your bloody games, Bodie. I'd have thought you'd have had enough of those for one day."

"For God's sake do you think I'd do that to you?" Bodie asked disgustedly. "The only people who _choose_ to inflict the Game on someone unwilling are sick bastards like Turner. The rest of us crossed our legs, and then spent our hard-earned cash on black-market condoms and prostitutes, just like everyone else."

"You always did have good taste in birds."

Bodie smiled back, the smile that actually involved his eyes. "I know. Almost makes up for my taste in blokes, doesn't it?"

"Well, pardon me for forcing you to lower your standards, your royal highness," Ray said, pulling Bodie to his feet and then propelling him backwards towards the bedroom door. "But I'm sure you can cope with slumming it for a little while."

"I imagine I'll recover," Bodie said, and let Doyle push him down onto the bed--Doyle felt him surrender himself into it and felt happiness bloom like a rose inside him. 

They both leaned in to kiss at the same time, their noses colliding before they got properly together. Bodie tasted of bitter chocolate--oddly, it was just what Doyle had imagined, though he had not--could not have--imagined the way Bodie's tongue would explore his mouth, making tantalising sweeps at the roof of his mouth and very lightly tracing the surface of his tongue. It tickled. He jumped, and their noses collided again.

"Ticklish, flower?" Bodie asked, but the superior tone was rather ruined by the heavy-lidded gaze and heavy breathing. Doyle felt the hands gripping his backside leave it, and when they came into view, Bodie was flexing his fingers with obvious evil intent.

"Oi, stop that, Bodie." It had about as much affect as he'd expected it to, which left him with one possible option--retaliation. "You don't half pick your moments." It was fortunate, he thought, as Bodie tried to reverse their positions, that he knew exactly where Bodie was ticklish. Classified information, that was, though he had to make a sudden sideways shift to stop Bodie's knee coming into involuntary contact with his groin. _That_ would definitely have hurt. He made a lightning fast lunge for the area where hipbone met thigh, and Bodie shied away before he'd even made contact

It didn't take long for Bodie's bulk and muscle to tell over Doyle's flexibility and speed. The fact that Ray was convulsed in giggles and shivers didn't help either.

He felt a sudden gust of hot breath on a very interested part of his anatomy. 

"Wha--" he said stupidly, wondering how and when Bodie had managed to undo his jeans.

Bodie turned hot eyes on him, not letting him up. "Let me show you how the Game was played between friends." Then he lowered his head.

Between friends. It was one thing to accept Bodie's murky past; it was quite another to have his black-and-white version of that past twist itself through ninety degrees and suddenly gain vivid shades of colour. To do so while his brains were being sucked out of his dick was something else again. 

He looked down along his body, and Bodie's eyes met his, impossibly darkened by the shadows of those incredible eyebrows. 

Bodie. Sucking him. 

Against his dick Bodie’s mouth felt endlessly hot and deep, and more intoxicatingly mobile than it had any right to. It didn't matter suddenly that Bodie 's large hands were gripping his hips too firmly for him to thrust, those hot lips and tongue were doing every bit of it for him.

The hands let go of him just as Doyle lost complete control. He reached down instinctively and seized Bodie's head, his body making those last, few, fast thrusts without conscious instruction from his brain, and then spilling over into the short eternity of completion.

It took a moment before he was able to pay attention to events around him again.

"Worth it, flower?"

"You could've let me get undressed, you bastard. Bet you've made a right mess of me clothes."

Bodie smirked, unrepentant, and proceeded to man-handle him out of his clothes with ruthless efficiency. Doyle was too drained either to resist or help. "Actually I was very clean about it. Housebroken, you know." 

Housebroken. Yeah, you could say that. "Suppose you want me to reciprocate now," he said, mock-longsuffering. 

Bodie raised an eyebrow at him. "Don't strain yourself, darlin'," he said.

"Fine." Doyle lay back and closed his eyes. "By the time you've got your kit off I might be able to stay awake long enough." He'd dreamt about tasting Bodie for ... how long? Hadn't expected it to happen like this, though, not at all.

He felt sorry for Bodie in a way, not knowing what love was. Almost its own reward, even, once you got past the wanting it back at all costs. Be nice to have it returned, to feel all the love that Bodie didn't believe he could give directed back at him, but if it never happened then this could still be enough. It'd be Bodie who'd be, ultimately, missing out.

"I'm undressed now, mum," Bodie said, and Doyle reluctantly opened his eyes. "You going to read me a goodnight story?"

"Never 'eard it called that before," Ray said, and, catching him unawares in his turn, pounced.

* * *

"It was a bit heavy today, wasn't it," Doyle said, when they were lying in a sweaty, sticky heap on the bedcovers.

"Just a bit," Bodie said muzzily. "I do have reasons for leaving my past out of things, you know." He turned his head towards Doyle as if that was the only motion for which he had strength enough and gave him a heavy-lidded look. Ray was lying on his front, stark naked except for the socks that Bodie had forgotten to remove.

"I know," Doyle said, turning his head to look at him. "Like you said, the past's just that--past. Just don't do that again to me, Bodie."

"Do what?" Bodie reached across, ran a hand down the length of Ray's sweaty back, from shoulder blade to perfect buttocks, revelling in the smoothness of the sweat-slick skin. 

"Play the Game. It's not good for my blood pressure."

"Always said you were an old man. No more Game ... I can live with that." 

"Well, 'cept if it's with me." 

"C'n live with that, too." Playing with Doyle again! He would look forward to it, with or without the excuse of 'partnership maintenance'.

Bodie drowsed for a few minutes, and would have fallen asleep when Doyle spoke again. "That was all right, that was."

All right. Yeah. He could definitely live with 'all right'.


End file.
